


The Architects

by chainofclovers



Category: The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-16
Updated: 2014-07-16
Packaged: 2018-02-09 03:46:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1967757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chainofclovers/pseuds/chainofclovers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A quite short piece written as an exercise in running quickly with a set of interconnected ideas/symbols. It was fun to write; hope it's fun to read.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Architects

Miranda invites difficulty, makes others' lives difficult, is difficult.

Some of it, Andy knows, is designed. Miranda is an architect of sorts, so smart and calculating that her cruelty really is a danger. Her life a series of plots unfurling according to plan, and if executing a plan means another person must crumple their own and throw it into the trashcan, so be it. Her preferences are so acutely felt, so overwhelmingly exact, that it is both enraging and commonplace to feel dissatisfied. Andy picks up on both, and has almost stopped being amazed by the way Miranda can at once be so angry and bored by her own emotions.

Some of it is environmental. Andy has learned to file away the little details Miranda tosses in her direction: a bored and distant father, a mother who is simply mean. They’re both still alive, but where? Nowhere Miranda visits. And motherhood: not always a natural state for a woman, though given her own mother’s failings, Miranda has no idea why she is surprised to have disappointed herself. To—she hopes not too horribly—disappoint her girls. To be a bad mother is to hate herself.

Some of it is genetic, or at least ingrained. Depression a cloud that, when passing through, shows Miranda a sky differently-colored than the one other people walk beneath. The shade is pre-storm dark, though the bright pretty things in _Runway_ do contrast nicely; that much she can see.

Smiles are the only thing Miranda fakes. With Andy, she fakes nothing. They’ve been fucking for months, fucking whenever they can, having skipped right over kissing or holding hands or going out, and from the very start there hasn’t been a single fabricated orgasm, a single exaggerated moan. There are nights when Miranda howls her pleasure, cannot get or give enough. But there are other nights, and plenty of them, when work is distracting or time is short or the sky is too dark and she can’t come. “It’s okay,” Andy always says, not that Miranda has asked forgiveness. Not that there is anything to forgive. When Andy feels awkward about it—especially on nights that their experience seems so unbalanced, when Miranda puts aside a difficult day to make Andy feel good, then her very muscles can’t seem to accept the reciprocation—she reminds herself that if she were bad at sex Miranda would have stopped sleeping with her long ago.

And that’s very lucky, because Andy loves Miranda. She has loved her for two years, in spite of them both. She never wants to stop.

“Keep going,” Miranda says tonight, though Andy fears she is rubbing her raw. A dark day for both of them, bad news rippling through the city, a moment of violence bubbling to the surface of this unbearably hot summer and halting the subway for two hours. Andy spends the day writing about it—she must write about so much violence in her work; Miranda, on a monthly production schedule, is powerless even to do that. She is reckless on the phone that evening, asking Andy to come over even though the girls are home. “I told them,” she had explained. “I told them I was having you over. It’s fine. Please.” Andy had believed her, and was right to believe her; she fakes nothing.

“Wait one sec,” Andy murmurs. She sits up and pulls a bottle of lube from the nightstand, smiling when she sees for the hundredth time the still life it completes in the drawer: lube and harness and vibrator and two dildos, none of which, Miranda once admitted happily, she ever thought she would have cause to use on a regular basis. Purchases she’d made from daydreams, really, and had never shown a man. The drawer they’re kept in now, a drawer meant for diaries or socks, should probably lock, but Miranda has become nonchalant about these matters. At least the bedroom door is locked.

Andy pours a few generous drops of lube onto her fingers and returns to Miranda, who blushes. “Don’t want it to hurt,” Andy says. “It’s okay.” Her mantra. She lies back down on her side, flush with Miranda’s body, one arm under Miranda’s neck, the hand cradling her shoulder.

The reduced friction is pleasant, and, as such, more minutes pass pleasantly. But Andy can tell Miranda is frustrated; she keeps shifting slightly, her exhalations a bit strained, as if she’s trying to keep from grunting. Tonight, after such a day, Andy feels like taking a risk. It’s been killing her for so many weeks, this stagnant exchange of orgasms and not-orgasms like the two of them are stuck in a hamster wheel. Better one wheel than two, but still: it hurts to love this much but to express it in only one way, and not always well, not always in a way that can reach past the difficulty and into Miranda. She pulls her hand away, runs it along the hem of the camisole Miranda still wears. Walks her fingers higher, back up to skin, and traces an invisible M across Miranda’s chest with her sticky index finger. Pauses, then adds an A. Miranda squirms then, and stares at the ceiling, so Andy lays her hand flat and still and squeezes Miranda’s shoulder with the hand that’s been there all along.

“Maybe,” Miranda ventures, “I’m not in the mood. I couldn’t help but call you, though, after today. I felt I had to see you.”

“I’m glad.” Andy can see the panic in Miranda’s eyes, can tell that Miranda has been unrolling a tube full of blueprints but has finished now, has reached the edge of the last neat page long before running out of time to live. Andy’s lips are inches from skin, and they should be used for something, for a declaration, for a kiss.

The latter wins, and their first purposeful kiss (this is no cursory greeting between lips and cheek or lips and air, or a kiss that’s sort of an ignorable side dish during sex) takes place where Miranda’s jaw turns into neck. “Let me kiss you,” Andy whispers after the fact, and they both chuckle until the sound is interrupted by the meeting of their lips. Miranda hums into Andy’s mouth, and when Andy notices her hand moving between her own legs, she interrupts the kiss long enough to make a demand: “Yes, Miranda. Touch yourself.”

It’s impossible for Andy to look away, then, though Miranda does, her head buried in the crook of Andy’s neck as she works her fingers around her clitoris. Andy memorizes her speed, her rhythm, stores up the precious details, knowing she will need them. She enters Miranda with three fingers and the pressure puts her over the edge. Even muffled, Miranda’s cries are a bit too loud, so they kiss as they keep going, drawing out two more climaxes together, Miranda shaking in her arms.

Later, arms brushing as they fall asleep, Andy can feel the next days being written. Although she doesn’t say the words out loud, _I love you_ no longer clogs her throat, a barrier through which any other word must pass. She will say it soon. They will be fine.

They wake up to rain on the morning which is in some ways their first real morning after. They shower together, kiss and kiss. Downstairs, Andy is casual with the twins during what is only their third or fourth meeting, and their first before noon: “Where’s the cereal, Caroline?” “You guys have any tests this week? Any matches?” “Yeah? Well, I hope soccer doesn’t get rained out.” They are casual in return, and relatively friendly; they aren’t too young to put on fake smiles and simpering tones, but they don’t, and Andy sees this as a victory. “If the match is on, I’ll be there,” Miranda says, and it’s Cassidy, not Miranda, who suggests that Andy come too.

Miranda offers Andy a ride to work, and they step out into the day together, heads bent against the rain. The sky is grey for everyone, a great dark dome.


End file.
